Throwing it out there as I did not know about it – Amazon is offering a free tier for its Elastic Cloud services. It’s available at http://aws.amazon.com/free. Only for the Linux “micro” instance, and only for a year, but it’s still very nice for me (mainly so I can avoid problems like waiting for 2 weeks for a new fan). The one thing that I found was rather dumb is I had to create a new account for it as it was reserved to new users and I had previously used Amazon S3 on my main account (why ever do people make these “new customers only” offers – are they really trying to alienate the existing customer base?). Also be careful not to make the same mistake I made – this pricing only applies to the “basic” Linux install, not the Suse or CentOS builds.

Also not sure when they added the Windows “Micro” instance – not part of this free tier but at $.03/hr that would be very economic way to run a small site if you need a bit more control than with an ASP.NET host (no, I very much doubt you can run SalesLogix on it, hah). It comes off quite a bit cheaper than MS Azure and I am not too sure what Azure buys you for the extra cost. Will be an interesting competition to watch in the coming months.